Emotions, persuasion, and public discourse in classical Athens

Ancient Emotions II

Dimos Spatharas

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110618426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is an addition to the burgeoning secondary literature on ancient emotions. Its primary aim is to suggest possible ways in which recent approaches to emotions can help us understand significant aspects of persuasion in classical antiquity and, especially audiences' psychological manipulation in the civic procedures of classical Athens. Based on cognitive approaches to emotions, Skinner's theoretical work on the language of ideology, or ancient theories about enargeia, the book examines pivotal aspects of psychological manipulation in ancient rhetorical theory and practice. At the same time, the book looks into possible ways in which the emotive potentialities of vision -both sights and mental images- are explained or deployed by orators. The book includes substantial discussion of Gorgias' approach to sights ' emotional qualities and their implications for persuasion and deception and the importance of visuality for Thucydides' analysis of emotions' role in the polis' public communication. It also looks into the deployment of enargeia in forensic narratives revolving around violence. The book also focuses on the ideological implications of envy for the political discourse of classical Athens and emphasizes the rhetorical strategies employed by self-praising speakers who want to preempt their listeners' loathing. The book is therefore a useful addition to the burgeoning secondary literature on ancient emotions. Despite the prominence of emotions in classicists' scholarly work, their implications for persuasion is undeservedly under-researched. By employing appraisal-oriented analysis of emotions this books suggests new methodological approaches to ancient pathopoiia. These approaches take into consideration the wider ideological or cultural contexts which determine individual speakers' rhetorical strategies.

This book is the second volume of Ancient Emotions, edited by George Kazantzidis and Dimos Spatharas within the series Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes. This project investigates the history of emotions in classical antiquity, providing a home for interdisciplinary approaches to ancient emotions, and exploring the inter-faces between emotions and significant aspects of ancient literature and culture

1Vision and emotions in Gorgias

1.1Preliminaries

According to Athenaeus, Gorgias dedicated a golden statue of himself at Delphi. Some years later, Eumolpus, Gorgias’ grand-nephew, dedicated a statue of his grand-uncle at Olympia.56 Gorgias’ dedication to a sanctuary where he delivered one of his epideictic speeches in front of a Panhellenic audience quite literally embodies his tendency to elevate his epideictic performances to spectacles.57 His fascination with the pleasures of the eye and visual illusion is plainly depicted in his frequent references to tragedy in the extant fragments,58 but also in the predominant role of vision in the arguments that he produces in the Encomium of Helen (15–19).

Judging from his extant works, visual perception is also fundamental to the epistemological assumptions that underlie his theorizing about persuasion and the nature of arguments from probability: for Gorgias, firm knowledge, as opposed to slippery ‘belief’ (δόξα), can only be the product of autopsy.59 Correlatively, Gorgias treats ‘speech’ (λόγος) as a medium of representation that makes invisible things visible to the eye of the mind mainly through the use of eikota, i.e. arguments that offer verisimilar approximations of factual reality.60 The power of ‘speech’ to fabricate likenesses of factual reality is also pivotal to the way in which Gorgias construes deception.61

In this chapter, I focus my attention on the relationship between vision and emotions in Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, a topic that has attracted some scholarly attention, but has not as yet received detailed discussion.62 In the fourth major part of his Encomium of Helen, a speech that seeks to defend Helen against poets’ accounts holding her responsible for her elopement to Troy, Gorgias theorizes about the ways in which the objects of vision shape our emotions. As I shall attempt to show, Gorgias’ discussion of the relationship between vision and emotions seems to draw on a pattern of thought that is common in archaic and classical poetry. Yet, the existing evidence makes it possible to suggest that Gorgias modifies cultural models of vision and emotion that he finds in the literary tradition which he seeks to refute.

Gorgias’ treatment of the psychological impact of images upon our emotions, I argue, is enhanced by theories of vision developed during his lifespan. This enhancement is symptomatic of the salient tendency of sophistic epideixis towards novelty. In addition, my discussion shows, I hope, that Gorgias’ arguments about the impact of vision upon human psychology displays cognitive elements which I find to be particularly relevant to his arguments about verbal persuasion. As we shall see, even as Gorgias explains the generation of emotions on the basis of a physicalist approach that combines philosophical theory with relevant folk patterns of thought, at the same time his argumentation emphasizes the power of emotions to impair our beliefs and generate emotions that affect our volition.

1.2Vision and the generation of emotions in the Encomium of Helen

Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen is an epideictic speech that, according to its author’s own words (1, 21), aims to praise Helen, a woman whose praiseworthiness can by no means be taken for granted.63 Yet the choice of this apparently paradoxical topic fits the generic aims of rhetorical display (epideixis): by choosing to praise Helen, Gorgias sets himself a difficult task and, thereby, advertises his ability to elaborate on a traditional mythological theme with great originality.64 Gorgias embarks on his encomium by attacking the poets who blamed Helen for her elopement to Troy and promises that he will attempt to remove the ‘infamy’ (δύσκλεια) from her through ‘logical reasoning’ (λογισμός) rather than on the basis of a new narrative version about the circumstances of her travel to Troy. As Gorgias says, hence suggesting that his aim is to address the issue of Helen’s responsibility rather than dispute matters of ‘factual’ reality,65 his own method of argument does not require telling a story that includes events that are known to everyone. Such a storytelling, Gorgias suggests, would make his speech ‘more credible but less charming’.66

The originality of Gorgias’ composition, therefore, lies in that he attempts to exculpate Helen through an argumentation that employs probabilities (εἰκότα), i.e. arguments that offer verisimilar approximations of truth whose persuasiveness is dependent upon audiences’ common experience.67 He thus claims that Helen went to Troy for one of the following reasons: either because it was the will of the gods, or because she was violently abducted, or because she was persuaded by words, or because she fell in love with Paris.68

The first two causes receive only brief discussion by Gorgias. But his arguments concerning the third and the fourth causes, i.e. ‘speech’ (λόγος) and ‘erotic desire’ (ἔρως) include much theorizing that focuses on the psychological impact of words and images respectively (8–14 and 15–19). As Gorgias explains by adducing a number of examples, both speech and vision can affect our sentiments by instilling into our souls positive or negative emotions.69 Emotions are hence pivotal to Gorgias’ arguments for Helen, because, on the view that he endorses, they induce us to do things that we would not have wanted or attempted to do if we were not under their control. In other words, emotions have a central role to the notion of acquiescence, the most typical aspect of ancient conceptualizations of verbal and non-verbal persuasion (πειθώ).70

Gorgias’ arguments about eros, the fourth cause that may have prompted Helen’s elopement, stress the psychological impact of perceived images upon our souls. From the outset of this discussion, Gorgias expresses programmatically his intention to make vision the central theme of his arguments about the compulsion of erotic love through the use of the following gnome:71

ἃ γὰρ ὁρῶμεν ἔχει φύσιν οὐχ ἣν ἡμεῖς θέλομεν ἀλλ’ ἣν ἕκαστον ἔτυχε. διὰ δὲ τῆς ὄψεως ἡ ψυχὴ κἀν τοῖς τρόποις τυποῦται.

‘Things that we see do not have the nature which we wish them to have but the nature which each one of them actually has; and by seeing them the mind [ψυχή] is moulded in its character too’. (15)

The first part of this formulation emphasizes the uncontrollability of the sights that viewers take in through sensory perception. Just as words penetrate our body and affect us emotionally (e.g. poetry ‘goes into listeners, εἰσῆλθε, 9)72 so do the images that we perceive through vision enter into our bodies physically and affect the disposition of our souls after coming into contact with them. When exposed to persuasive speeches or sights, human volition is extirpated (cp. [sc. persuasion] τὴν ψυχὴν ἐτυπώσατο ὅπως ἐβούλετο, 13). Furthermore, as the examples that he discusses later indicate (16–19), images are construed by Gorgias as bearing emotional charge: a frightful sight engenders fear, while the sight of a beautiful body inflicts erotic desire or longing. The word that Gorgias uses to denote what I have rendered with the word ‘affect’ is τυποῦται, whose literal meaning is ‘to stamp’ or ‘to imprint’.73

The explanation of vision’s psychological impact in physical, materialist terms is a salient feature of Gorgias’ treatment of the function of vision (ὄψις) that markedly highlights viewers’ passivity: at 16, vision is said to ‘go’ to the soul (ἐλθοῦσα, 16) and, more importantly, at paragraph 17, vision is presented as ‘imprinting’ images on the mind. In Gorgias’ eyes, hence, emotions are not generated in or by the soul, but rather enter into it externally and shape it through the agency of perceived images (or, as he shows, in 9–10, through words).

Ancient popular and ‘scientific’ models of explanation construe vision as a haptic sense. Furthermore, these models may broadly be divided into two distinct categories: the active or emmissionist, positing that the eyes play an active role by casting rays on the objects of sensory perception and the passive, emanationist, according to which the eye receives effluences emitted by the objects of sights.74 Although the difficulties of interpretation involved in the theories of vision proposed by the major representatives of these categories are immense, it is important to note that “[T]hese folk and scientific models are important because in their different ways they are compatible with beliefs that the eyes may cause or lay one open to a variety of profound and often unwelcome physical changes. Such, for example, is the belief that diseases such as eye-infections and epilepsy, and physical-cum-spiritual afflictions such as miasma (pollution) may be transmitted by sight” (Cairns 2011: 42).

Gorgias’ physicalist approach to emotions throughout Helen indicates that he endorses a passive understanding of vision, emphasizing the psychological effects of sights upon beholders. This approach serves efficiently his argument, in so far as it reduces Helen, albeit, as we shall see, in a subversive way, into a victim of the external and uncontrollable power of vision. In doing so, he presents vision –qua elicitor of strong emotions– as an agent of coercion whose effectiveness is comparable with divine will, physical violence, and persuasion. Note, for example, that at the conclusion of his discussion of visual persuasion (19), Gorgias says that it was Helen’s eye, rather than Helen, which was pleased at the sight of Paris’ body.

In this chapter, I argue that Gorgias deploys current scientific theories of vision in order to promote his epideictic argument and show that Helen was not responsible for her travel to Troy. His appropriation of scientific theories of vision is compatible with folk assumptions concerning vision’s importance for the onset of erotic love in earlier literature. In Gorgias’ speech, Helen, the archetypical object of amazed male erotic gazes in earlier literature (and in Gorgias’ encomiastic prelude in this speech, emphasizing the godlike beauty of her body, 4),75 becomes the victim of Paris’ beauty. Current theories of vision are thus put to the service of Gorgias’ attempt to fly in the face of poets, presented collectively as ignoramuses, by using their own weapons.

As I suggested, throughout his treatment of the psychological impact of sights, Gorgias seems to deploy emanationist approaches. His gravitation towards emanationist, intromissive models of vision is anticipated in the opening of the fourth major argument (15), indicating the passivity of the beholder. For example, when he says that the objects of our sight have the nature that they happen to have, rather than the nature that we would want them to have, he emphasizes the uncontrollability of the psychic effects caused by the multiformity of sights to which humans are exposed. Thus, physis is construed as commensurate with natural (or divine, cp. πέφυκε at 6) necessity.

As is commonly the case in ancient philosophy and literature, chance is construed here as the equivalent of ‘necessity’ (ananke). Note, for example, that chance and necessity are conjoined in Gorgias’ formulation about the indefensible compulsion exercised by divine will (ἢ γὰρ Τύχης βουλήμασι καὶ θεῶν βουλεύμασι καὶ Ἀνάγκης ψηφίσμασιν ἔπραξεν ἃ ἔπραξεν, 5).76 ‘Necessity’ and ‘chance’ are also employed by Gorgias to qualify the compulsion of persuasive speeches (ἀνάγκης εἶδος ἔχει μὲν ο...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction: Persuasion, rhetoric, and the theory of emotions
• 1 Vision and emotions in Gorgias
• 2 Vision and collective emotions in Thucydides: eros, pothos, and anger
• 3 Enargeia, emotions, and violence in forensic storytelling
• 4 The ideological uses of ‘legitimate envy’ in classical Athens
• 5 Self-praise and envy in rhetoric and the Athenian courts
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index Rerum et Nominum
• Index Auctorum Antiquorum et Locorum